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A few times in the past few months, Elon Musk has said that Tesla would remove its human safety monitors in some robotaxis by the end of this year.
This is the biggie. Or one of the biggies. It’s one thing to have ~30 robotaxis driving around Austin and San Francisco with human safety drivers supervising things (yet, somehow, not preventing several accidents). It’s something else entirely to take the human safety drivers out of the cars completely and take on full responsibility from Tesla HQ.
Elon Musk just repeated that Tesla will hit that target, in a few weeks. Naturally, if you know how calendars work, you know that means he’s planning to barely meet the claim.
Specifically, at the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk said, “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them, not even anyone in the passenger seat, in about three weeks.”
There are basically two ways to look at this. You can believe that Tesla really is on track and FSD is fully ready to start driving people around without human supervision. Or you can assume that Elon Musk painted himself into a corner here, isn’t really ready to implement this, and is going to do so in a very limited way in order to keep his word. Funny enough, as I was about to write this article, one of our very longtime readers, vensonata, commented on another article, “Elon has stated that driverless taxi will appear in 3 weeks (from Dec.9). I will dare a prediction: a driverless car will appear, but it will have a remote ‘safety person’ watching and able to intervene. The area will be limited which the vehicle can go to. In other words, like a waymo, and the new Zoox.”
That would actually match up a bit with how Tesla has been operating its Optimus humanoid robot out in public. As has widely been seen now, one of Tesla’s flashy robots recently collapsed in Miami as a result of the human operator hiding somewhere off set taking his headset off before logging out, which is what apparently causes this to happen.
can’t stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot
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— James Vincent (@jjvincent.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 4:29 AM
We will see. One way or another, 2026 has to be a make it or break it year. Either Elon Musk finally achieves what he’s been saying is about to happen for several years now, or the hype bubble has to explode, right? Take out the popcorn!
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